When the Berlin Techno scene emerged in the wake of the fall of the wall in 1989, party-goers often occupied urban relics: they danced in old factories and power stations, in the basements of decaying buildings, and in the obsolete infrastructure of the Cold War. Much like other countercultural movements since the 1950s, the ravers of late twentieth-century Berlin sought adventure in the interstitial, “underground” spaces of the everyday. While scholars have thoroughly addressed the spatial dimension of countercultural and underground movements – the construction of “heterotopias” (Foucault) – less attention has been paid to the creation of distinct temporal experiences – what might be termed the “heterochronies” of the underground. Continue reading →

The West Berlin avant-garde music scene from around 1980 was a wild movement. This scene is an inexhaustive source of fascinating stories and ideas. For instance, while the rest of West Germany was trying to cope with the threat of a nuclear war, Blixa Bargeld tried to recreate the sound of collapsing buildings, and the girls from Malaria! played with the gruesome idea of bathing in ice cold and clear water, as if they couldn’t wait to speed things up and call upon the end of the world by themselves. Frontstadt West Berlin was the perfect playground for developing an experimental and mysterious scene like this one. But how to define this avant-garde scene? Continue reading →